Curt Benjamin - [Seven Brothers 03] - The Gates of Heaven

by Curt Benjamin

  “I asked Prince Tayyichiut about his uncle today. He defended Mergen-Khan with politics, but I’m not so sure.”

  He explained the conversation, and his own political calculations, all of which led to Chimbai-Khan dead and a worrisome brother set in his place. He finished with the conclusion that troubled him most, that had sent him out looking for Shou in the dark of his night: “Did Mergen plotwith the Lady Chaiujin to kill his brother?”

  Habiba watched him out of hard dark eyes that reminded Llesho of the times the magician had appeared in the form of a roc. “According to Kaydu’s report, he wants her dead, to avenge his brother’s murder.”

  “It’s what he said,” Llesho agreed, “and Prince Tayy believes it. But what if Mergen-Khan really wants to remove the only witness to his conspiracy?”

  “Or,” Shou lifted his shoulders away from the doorjamb and wandered—casually, he would have them think, though some restless torment burned in his eyes—into the room. “He may be as innocent as he claims, and wary enough to keep secret the people he loves, who might still die for being close to him.” His glance flickered off the Lady SeinMa’s face, as if his point went to a different argument, one that tightened her ladyship’s mouth into a cold frown.

  “You’re the emperor of Shan,” she reminded him tartly, “One values your life for more than the entertainment it affords.”

  In the silence that followed, Llesho dropped the question he hadn’t wanted to ask at all in front of the mortal goddess who shared the emperor’s bed. “Has Tinglut offered you a daughter?”

  “One serpent in my bed is enough.” Shou bowed his head at the lady, who glared back. “I declined.”

  Llesho remembered another dream: Shou and the Lady SeinMa as a turtle and a white cobra. Hereally didn’t want to be having this conversation. But they were waiting for him, so he plunged ahead.

  “How can we trust a treaty with Tinglut here in the East when he’s already murdered Chimbai-Khan and brought down all our agreements in the West? And how can we defeat Master Markko if all the Harn ally with him against us?”

  The Lady SeinMa actually smiled at him. It didn’t make him glow with pride. He wanted to curl up in a little ball under the table where, hopefully, her piercing eyes could not find him. That didn’t seem like the kingly thing to do, however, so he locked his knees and tried not to shake.

  “You are beginning to think like a general,” she praised him, and he wished he could crawl inside himself and disappear. “But you base your conclusions on two assumptions that may not be true.”

  Habiba nodded support for his lady’s argument. “You assume that Lady Bamboo Snake is the true daughter of Tinglut-Khan,” he said.

  With his gaze fixed on the Lady SeinMa, Shou added, “And you assume that a man of subtle ambition will betray his brother and his duty for the whispered promises of a serpent in his ear.”

  Llesho wondered who, besides Mergen, Shou referred to in that comment, but he grabbed for the part he felt safe to address: “You think that the Lady Chaiujin isn’t Tinglut-Khan’s true daughter?”

  “More properly,” Habiba corrected him, as a teacher might, “one must ask if the serpent is the Lady Chaiujin at all.”

  “Then you think Master Markko killed the real daughter, and put the snake in her place?”

  “Only the underworld knows the truth of that,” Lady SeinMa said, “But it wouldn’t do to underestimate Lady Bamboo Snake herself, who may have acted for her own reasons.”

  He’d come for answers, and they’d given him more questions. A huff of frustration escaped him and Llesho pressed his lips closed. Unthought reactions wouldn’t serve him here. But the exasperation was still there. “Do you have any proof at all that I can take back with me?”

  “Just this,” Habiba told him, “that Kaydu, in her report, described the Lady Chaiujin as very beautiful and young. In the camp of her father, the aged khan, the lady has a reputation for kindness and plain features.”

  That certainly didn’t describe the Lady Chaiujin he knew. Llesho felt as if he’d been set adrift in deep water, and without a paddle. “What am I supposed to do?”

  Shou blinked, surprised. “Exactly what you are doing,” he said. “Watch, evaluate, act as well as you can. That’s all anyone can do.”

  Habiba nodded. “Leave the problem of Lady Bamboo Snake to Mergen-Khan, but see what he does. It will doubtless teach you something.”

  He would have objected, but Pig, who had said nothing during this conversation, moved toward the door. Llesho felt a tug at his gut, moving him away from Shou and toward the light of morning.

  Chapter Five

  HE AWOKE from his dream travels with more to worry about than when he’d gone to bed, and stumbled out into the false dawn of Little Sun for morning prayer forms. Their camp had followed the pattern of the Harnish one they had replaced in the dell. It had a clearing at its center where horsemen mustered for battle or to play the competitive games that honed their skills at mounted warfare. With Master Den to chivy them on, the space easily became a practice yard for the prayer forms of the seven mortal gods, first step on the Way of the Goddess. The forms had been a lifeline through all the turmoil and struggle that had brought Llesho from the pearl beds to the very brink of his own country again. With a sense of fitness that settled in his heart, therefore, he scrambled sleepily for his place in the ranks of the worshipers, and stretched into the familiar patterns as Master Den called out their names.

  “Red Sun.” Den moved his huge pale body with agile grace into the simplest of the fire forms.

  Llesho followed his lead, stretching his body with arms raised in a high curve. Secure in his companions, with Kaydu on one side and Bixei on the other, with Hmishi in back of him and Lling in front, and Stipes a steady presence nearby, he reached for the zenith as the Sun might, chasing its lesser brother. Then down again, until the backs of his fingers almost reached the ground to represent the setting of the sun in the slow circling of the Way of the Goddess.

  “Flowing River,” Den called next, a water prayer to honor the Onga at their backs.

  The present was a landmark passed in a never-ceasing flow into the future. But sometimes, as if around an unexpected bend in the river, you saw the past as well, the one you knew and the markers grown strange long before you were born. Llesho stretched and moved in the slow rhythm of the prayer form, letting his mind drift with river-thoughts flowing back into time. Ages drifted past his mind’s eye. In all of them, he fought and died, and fought and died again, until he wondered how many lives had ended violently, and why?

  No sooner had he thought the question than he saw, across a turning in the flow of movement, a man wearing his face but twice his age and more, worn down with battle. A bloody spear lay beside him—Llesho knew that weapon, carried it in his pack—and blood crusted on his skin grown pale with wounds and the poisons coursing through them. A woman wept for him, his head cradled in her lap. Llesho knew her from his dream travels. The Great Goddess, his wife, had appeared to him in the guise of a young girl and other times as a beekeeper. She had comforted him after Master Markko’s torments, when the magician’s potions had left him shattered and weak, and he knew his duty to rescue her from the siege at her gates. Her presence at this one of his deaths did not surprise him.

  Watching the scene as if across a curving river, he saw the boundaries between past and present thinning in the way he had come to know under Bolghai’s teaching. He stood on one side of the river bend, with the answers to his questions on the other, and centered his mind. The prayer form carried him deeper into his vision and—step, step—he stood above his dying self, looking into the grieving eyes of the Great Goddess, his wife in that life as in this. He saw, first of all things in her eyes, that she loved him as truly and deeply in age as he loved her in youth. And each of his deaths left its mark on her heart, which he regretted.

  “Will it always be like this?” he asked, while the breath of his older self stuttered and b
ubbled in his broken chest. He recognized the wound, had seen it in dreams of other ages as the mark of the spear he carried, that now lay stained upon the riverbank. Llesho would have run away, afraid he saw his future in his past. This was his own fate, though like a dream he saw nothing to tell him how his former self had taken such an injury, or what threats waited just outside the boundary of his vision.

  “That depends on you,” the lady his wife answered with tears in her eyes, and he wondered if she meant he had failed the past, and would fail again in this turning of the wheel. But she gave no sign of blaming him, only mourning all the pasts in which he’d died as he was doing now, on the grass by a river that couldn’t be the Onga.

  The lashes of his dying self fluttered open, and for a moment, his own older eyes, dulled with pain fading into death, met his younger ones. His dying self gestured for him to draw nearer, and he bent to hear the strangled whisper,

  “Remember justice. The world cannot endure without justice.” Satisfied that he had said what he must, the dying Llesho’s eyes clouded. A tiny frown marked his ravaged brow until the Great Goddess his wife leaned into his field of vision again. Then, with a sigh as if something had completed itself, breathing stopped.

  He wanted to ask if he’d been so unjust in his actions that he needed a reminder, but the lady’s eyes had closed and she rocked the body in her arms as if she could not hold the pain inside her. This was one of those moments that wasn’t about him, he figured—or not about the present him at any rate—and he didn’t want to intrude on her grief to make it so. But her Way had brought him here to learn something. His questions might save them all from going through the same again.

  “What did he—I—mean about justice?”

  “Remember,” she said, while she pressed his dead mouth to her bosom, “your heart will guide you.”

  He’d gladly do as she bid him, if he had any idea what it was she meant for him to know. But she wasn’t seeing him anymore, he could tell. With a step, and another step, he found himself among the ranks of his cadre again, with Master Den calling out the prayer forms. At his side, Bixei started, but quickly regained his place in the slow procession of the movements.

  “Wind bends the willow,” Master Den called out the air form.

  Like the willow tree, Llesho thought, he must bend to the Way of the Goddess, accepting his fate in her service. His past had spoken to him of justice, but he didn’t know why. He would die in battle in this life as he had so many times before, he thought, killed by his own tainted weapon or by the poisons of some secret enemy, shot through with flights of arrows, or cut down by sword or with a dagger to a kidney in the embrace of a false friend. So many ways had he died, and nothing he had seen promised an old age surrounded by grandchildren. When the prayer form returned them to the rest position he discovered tear tracks on his cheeks and a yearning powerful as the river current drawing his gaze to the distant mountains.

  “To die in your arms,” was all he had asked of the Great Goddess out of all his pasts. He knew that now, and felt her kiss in the breeze that lifted the hair from his brow. That did comfort him: wherever this turn of the wheel brought him, he loved and was loved in return, and gave his life in the service of that great love. It had, his vision told him, always been enough.

  Master Den brought them back to rest. With a bow to the gathered students, and a bow from the ranks in turn, morning prayers ended.

  “Where did you go?” Bixei asked him while his cadre gathered their gear.

  Llesho gave a shrug. “I don’t know. The past, I think.” He wouldn’t accept it for his future—not this time around.

  “What did you see?”

  Kaydu had returned, sword and dagger cinched at her waist and Little Brother perched on her shoulder. “You were there,” she said, “and then you weren’t.”

  Hmishi handed Llesho his gear. “And then you were back again,” he finished for his cadre.

  Llesho took the short spear and strapped it to his back. The sword he clipped to his belt where his knife already rode, never leaving him as was the way of Thebin royals. Settling his weapons about him gave him a moment to compose his thoughts, but only Lling and Stipes did not press him for an answer. Lling shied away from her own questions and Stipes, he knew, still felt as though he rode above his station in this company. He flicked a challenge at Hmishi, however, daring him to speak of where he had been before Bright Morning had raised him from the dead.

  A soft smile told him this most gentle of his fierce companions would not take the bait. “How can we protect you if you insist on going places we can’t follow?” Hmishi asked. And he added, “At least you could tell us what to expect of your sudden excursions out of this world.”

  Before he could come up with an answer, Master Den joined them with a wide grin. “Well done, young king,” he praised Llesho with a pat on the back that nearly threw him to his knees. “I knew that with a little help you’d figure it out.”

  “Figurewhat out?” Kaydu insisted. She was their captain, and had the right to demand answers where it concerned the safety of their charge. More to the point, she was a witch like her father, and wanted to understand the workings of any magic she came in contact with.

  “The Way of the Goddess,” Master Den answered, “is the path to heaven. For some that means a life well lived in a manner that finds welcome from the Great Goddess. To others, who practice the forms with extraordinary skill, the Way is a more direct road which one may travel at will, or stumble upon in moments when need and proper form come together.”

  “There must be many roads to heaven,” Llesho suggested the thought as it came to him, and Master Den applauded his perception.

  “The Goddess honors the path of earth and air, fire and water, out of which all living things are formed. The spirits of the grasslands travel the underworld of dreams and spirit-animals and the dead who lately honored the living world and the ancestors who went before them. Between them roam the mortal gods and mortal humans who would aspire to the ranks of heaven, which must surely count among their numbers the beloved husband.”

  At this last Master Den gave a little bow. His cadre had fallen silent, half afraid even to hear the conversation between the trickster god and his royal pupil. For himself, Llesho didn’t quite know if his teacher honored him or mocked him. Perhaps both: honored for reaching through the prayer forms to what lay behind them, and mocked for taking so long to discover what that was. He ducked his head in confusion, unsure whether to be proud or embarrassed, but still troubled by what he had seen.

  “I died,” he said.

  “Often,” Master Den agreed in a familiar tone that reminded Llesho he traded words with the trickster god. ChiChu had, perhaps, known him in those others lives and deaths.

  “The Goddess wept,” he added, and again his teacher nodded his agreement.

  “Always,” Master Den said.

  “Then perhaps it’s time to try a different way.”

  With that, Llesho drew his sword, baring steel, and he showed his teeth in a warrior’s grin. His cadre understood. Kaydu met his grin with a like challenge of her own and Little Brother dived into the pack on her back as steel hissed from its scabbard.

  “Defend yourself,” she dared him, meaning in this practice contest and also to learn enough to stay alive in the battles that lay ahead.

  They had, he realized, taken on another charge in their growing quest—to arrive at the end of it alive, and end the tears of the Goddess. And as he fell into a fighting stance, an echo of a feeling shivered down his spine. He lay dying, beyond pain, except for the breaking of his heart at the tears of his beloved wife who wept above him. “Don’t cry,” his own voice whispered down through memories he could not have, and he resolved that she would not, this time, weep for him.

  “Enough!” Kaydu called out, and Llesho dropped his aching arm to his side, waiting for the trembling to stop before he tried to settle his sword in its scabbard. His knife went easily to its shea
th, however. He wiped his brow with the back of his wrist and let the practice yard come back into focus while he caught his breath. Shokar, he saw, waited patiently for the warriors to settle battle reflexes before he spoke.

  “Adar would like to see you,” he said when nerves had calmed enough for Little Brother to venture out of his pack. Bixei and Lling had ended their practice as well, and along with Stipes and a still struggling Hmishi, came to achy attention.

  “Tales of the Lady Chaiujin’s challenge to the new khan and her transformation into an emerald bamboo serpent have reached the infirmary,” Shokar explained Adar’s summons. “Our brother has heard and needs assurance that you won’t do something stupid.”

  Shokar softened the message with an ironic twist of his mouth. Adar never doubted what he must do, but if the story of Llesho’s own meeting with the lady had reached him, his brother would surely have words for him to rival Shokar’s angry lecture.

  “I suppose it won’t help my case to say I’m busy.”

  “You can delay the inevitable, but not for long. And he won’t forget about it,” Shokar pointed out. “It’s not like he has anything else to occupy his mind.”

  He would have questioned that. Adar had the healer, Carina, to think about, something he did with fixed attention. She returned Adar’s gaze with stars glittering in her eyes. Once Llesho had wanted her to look at him that way. He’d gotten past that and now hoped that their interest in each other might distract them from his own foolishness.

  “Best get it done, then,” Kaydu suggested as his cadre settled itself in defensive formation around him. Llesho never went anywhere without his cadre now, including Stipes. The man wasn’t officially a part of the team as constructed by the Lady SeinMa, but he’d been an unofficial member since he and Bixei had found each other again in the midst of battle several countries ago in the flight from Farshore. Despite the loss of an eye in Llesho’s service, he fought for his right to be there and refused to be left behind. No one tried to stop him as he fell in beside them now.